halfcactus

Ahhhh I can't believe November's almost over. A couple of weeks ago we had a typhoon that was as big as our entire country. The coastal areas bore the brunt and weakened it; I spent that weekend keeping an eye on the news while watching a bunch of movies and Physical: Asia, which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected (at 1.5x speed) though I can't be bothered to watch the finale.

MOVIES:

Ballad of a Small Player; American Psycho; The Running Man (2025); Superman (2025); Legend of Hei 2

Ballad of a Small Player (2025)
Directed by Edward Berger, who worked on Conclave (which I haven't seen). This movie is all style, no substance. Macau is painted as a rainbow of neon, dreams, and desperation with a display of excess that feels thematically performative—Colin Farrell plays a gambler who calls himself Lord Doyle and performs at opulence and meaningless hunger. Fala Chen's character recognizes in him a "lost soul" and appears to feel a thread of connection to him. I feel like if the movie had tried to flesh out her thoughts and motives this movie would have struck me as orientalist, but there really is not enough substance here to turn over. It is, however, very nice to look at.

American Psycho (2000)
A portrait of the wealthy as vapid, interchangeable men in suits who are in constant need of affirmation and identity markers and are quite literally an echo chamber. For all their resources, they never achieve self-actualization. They don't even have real jobs. The jokes are funny, but I'm extremely squeamish about violence so I ended up only watching the first third of the movie—which was enough to see its thesis statement—and listening to the rest. Patrick Bateman is the OG # performative male.

Superman (2025)
Enjoyed this a lot, not just because there's a DOG (though mostly because of the dog). Hearing Noah and the Whale's 5 Years Time in a 2025 blockbuster was NOT in my bingo card, didn't really know how to feel about that. The first hour really flew by, while the second one was very standard superhero shtick. The visual gags were fun, the interpersonal conflicts were great, and the ending was satisfying. It's very much a socially relevant movie that's centered on human experiences and doing good. I watched this while a supertyphoon was brewing and seeing the extras take their pets with them in the evacuation scene really hit hard.

The Running Man (2025)
Rather than a dystopian movie, this is more like an alternate reality one, since its themes are very much "present". Apparently this is not just an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, it's also not the first one? It's definitely a great one to catch at the theater and immediately forget once it's over. There's a lot of interesting action, fun references to reality TV shows, and timely reminders about the dangers of AI and digital surveillance and cops, though it's horribly underwritten and overly sanitized. The script simply doesn't support the film's intentions. The dialogue in the last 1/3 outright assumes that the audience is stupid, and the ending is played so safe it loses its meaning.

Glen Powell's character's defining characteristic is meant to be his ANGER towards injustices but he just isn't angry enough and is weirdly passive for someone who's known for always going rogue. Rated R-18, but values are very family-friendly. Michael Cera's scenes were the truest part, both in terms of underground activism (the zines!) and in terms of what I think of as Edgar Wright's directorial voice, which seemed otherwise lost.

罗小黑战记2 | Legend of Hei 2 (2025)
I can see this movie selling really well to overseas animation fans (or at least battle shounen fans), but as I feared, for a movie about Xiao Hei, this didn't have enough Xiao Hei. ;___; First half was great, but second half was bogged down by too many action scenes that didn't feel very meaningful; the entire appeal of the first movie (and even the TV series!) for me was the characters, the relationships, and emotionally driven action and personal conflicts. Instead, this movie was high-stakes and brought to a real-life level I simply didn't care about. There were too many scenes of NPCs with no clear motive or emotional development and the "mystery" suffered for it.

Humor, banter, slice-of-life moments, and 晚安喵 montages were still on-point, though! Like I would still rewatch this for all the character interactions (and I would live in the montages if I could), it's just that I think this movie should have focused more on the found family storyline.

Words are from a poem by Li-Young Lee and Bird of the Summer by A Fine Frenzy.

I have not seen any egrets—which used to hang around our area in the recent years—since the 7th of May, but I've had sightings of other birds after that. These days I'm back to only seeing sparrows, though sometimes I hear orioles flying overhead in the morning.

More journal photos

The fire was just down the street. It turned out only to be a first-alarm fire and was put out pretty quickly, but I was too alarmed to take a video. /o\






Went through a minor crisis because these Japanese jam and butter packets gave me SO much joy but are so wasteful:


Vocabulary from Justice in the Dark:

Movies

The Rose of Versailles (2025)
Most of the story was compressed into music video form so it felt kind of like a musical? It's a very vibes-y adaptation with unapologetic anachronisms, but ultimately lacked closure between the two lead characters. It's a fun movie to watch with a friend, though, especially when none of you are familiar with the original canon. There's so much to comment on! (Me: "Oooh is he regaining his eyesight?" / Daisy: "Oooh is he losing sight in his other eye?")

The Match (2025)
Netflix markets this as a psychological thriller that highlights the main character's breakdown, but it's actually a character study about two inter-generational baduk players (the peerless mentor and his prodigious student) who push and pull each other and breathe new life into the sport. (Found out afterwards that this movie was based on real players.) Really enjoyed this one!

Detective Chinatown 1900 (2025)
I... How do I put it? If my paternal elders' chain mails were turned into a movie, this is what comes out—buddy-cop dynamics, broad humor, Chow Yun-fat's long dramatic spiels about Sinophobia, and racist caricatures of Native American culture (that these characters are portrayed as good people is immaterial).

Zhang Xincheng (playing a supporting character) was very attractive when he swore in English. IIRC he even won an award for his performance in this movie, which is painful to me because while I like that he did this movie because it broadens his network, I absolutely do not want people to associate him with this. 😂

Webtoons

The Wicked Ladies-in-Waiting (S1)
Het romantasy that puts emphasis on gen + found family relationships. Although it begins with a standard romance setup (the FL and ML's first meeting), the two leads part almost immediately so the FL can pursue her revenge and nudge the second prince to bid for the throne.

A quote from the scene where the second prince cross-dresses and earnestly draws inspiration from his ladies-in-waiting: Examples of true women I know, and not mere images people made up... It's Coco, who is confident and charming like a flickering flame, and Julia, who is tranquil yet formidable like the waves. Julia and Coco are like teachers, friends, and sisters to me, and I have been closer to them than anybody else.

The Tale of Goldiluck the Black Kitten
Life has simply not been the same since I finished this. I spent months unlocking 2-3 chapters a day, a most soothing routine, and when I finally got to the end life felt so empty. ;__; This is a gen + found family manhwa that ended with a trope that's usually associated with romance. Ahhhh I love them so much! And the manhwa loves cats so much, I cried so hard over each and every one of them (except maybe Goldiluck's derpy bio-dad lol).

The artist's current project is a Shape of the Water-esque BL manhwa where one of the characters is an orca that can take human form, which is... very on-brand for them.

Misc.

Sa Ye audio drama eps 1–2
Listened to the first two eps of the censored cut; I am unclear if anything was cut in these two eps and hated the feeling so much I couldn’t go on. The AD seems to start you off at a different point from the novel. Rather than guiding you through the leads' first meeting, it drops you straight in the classroom, at which point they've already met and I have no idea how many characters I'm listening to because they're all delinquent-type boys.

Link Click

Overall thoughts about the donghua

Season 1 was pretty great and well-paced. It had a case-of-the-day format for the first half, with filler cases between the heavy ones... The noodle girlfriends were sweet... And the entire basketball arc was so well done! But I wouldn't have finished this on my own because it's just too stressful for me.

Season 2 is almost purely plot-driven, but the plot wasn't that great... Without the time to breathe or the thread of emotional logic it had in season 1, the gendered violence and weaknesses in writing women were much more prominent. To be fair I don't think any of the characters are written well here (the main villain was cartoonishly bad), but the women definitely got the shorter end of the stick for me. It had a lot of missed opportunities with the lesser villains' motivations and character arcs, and one of the episodes had an extremely extended domestic violence scene.

AND episode 9 is a total waste of time. It was meant to be a "three stories" episode playing with different art styles, something that is normally my favorite kind of episode, but it ends up only showing us 1) nothing we didn't already know 2) information about the main villain that would have been better off revealed much earlier... The entire episode was like 26 minutes, and I was so annoyed by it I almost left the groupwatch ajskdl;ja;fdja;fa

First impression on manhua + live action adaptation

I checked out the manhua and live action afterwards to 緩一緩, and I'm really enjoying the manhua! Volume 1 has an opera troupe case set in the aftermath of the basketball arc, where you can see the emotional fallout and Lu Guang's attempt to give Cheng Xiaoshi some time travel therapy... Will definitely continue.

As for the live action adaptation... the Slam Dunk props are inconspicuous reminders that I'm watching a Sugarman Media production. :P The setup is also quite different, as Cheng Xiaoshi is superhuman in more than the specific time travel way... and he and Lu Guang meet as adults, with Lu Guang purposefully seeking him out to presumably set things right. (I haven't watched past episode 1, so it's still unclear what Lu Guang wants.)

热辣滚烫 YOLO (2024)
Chinese movie adaptation of 100 Yen Love.

Thoughts

I never saw the original, so I went into this assuming it was a sports movie, only to find out it wasn't as sports- and FL-centric as I initially thought.

The most interesting part about this movie for me is how it carefully avoids bodyshaming the main character, who for most of the movie is thirty years old, depressed, and fat. She ends up losing weight when she decides to get serious about boxing, but the focus is on how much better she feels when she pursues a goal and learns to do things for herself. The movie acknowledges her as not being conventionally attractive, but it also portrays her as being desirable, in a way that I found pretty natural and realistic.

That said, I don't think this was a very good movie... it uses that one cinematic gimmick that I've come to HATE in cmedia, in which scenes are omitted and then shown as "reveals" in the end, to purposes I don't understand... The main character's emotional arc would have been far more compelling from the get-go if it had been told in a regular, linear fashion!!!!!!!!!! The little 小紅花 montage would still have worked, I promise!!!!!!!

Anyway, I enjoyed the last 30-ish minutes (which had the training montage + ending), but I watched most of the middle bits in the fastest speed Netflix would allow me to watch it in.

The Double eps 1-20
DNF, but sometimes I go back to rewatch the music battle scenes (ep 11).

PS. Netflix appears to do this weird censored words thing where it avoids offensive language? Sometimes to ludricous effect. "Xiao jianren" got translated as "you cow" and "hellcat", which... okay...


Also saw other movies I saw when I was rooming with my parents (due to ant problems)! I think they were Oppenheimer and a recent Matt Damon heist movie (it wasn't great). Did another Kung Fu Hustle rewatch too, since it's apparently on Netflix, and yeah... still a classic. :) Curiously, I get more stressed watching this as an adult, in anticipation of the "painful" scenes (mostly in the first half, a.k.a. the best parts) which is funny because this movie is also now "comfort movie" status to me... Landlady with hair rollers you will always be a legend. ♥


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Other recents:
( August life updates )

ISMM manhua is back with volume 9! umichii sent me a care package (not because of ISMM vol 9 day, it just so happened that she sent it to me this very day haha):

Recently watched

Romance on the Farm
I was mostly watching this to make use of my iQiyi sub that I forgot to cancel and I finished juuuuuuust on time. (I watched the last ~10-ish eps in 2x speed. XD)

26 episodes is a really good drama length!

( more thoughts )

My main complaint is that I never got a good grasp of the FL as a character, though Tian Xiwei played her well. She had this interesting mother-daughter angst at the beginning that just… disappeared and never came up again, as if she competely assimilated with her videogame persona. Weird! But the innovation storylines felt more well-done than other dramas I've seen with similar themes (A Dream of Splendor, New Life Begins), maybe because they weren't as focused on feminist messaging and got to let the characters have fun.

Overall, an easy watch with heavyhanded family drama. The scheming is on par w/ palace harem dramas, but you get the relaxing view of the countryside and small communities. Acting-wise, it did well with the ensemble cast with family members playing off each other. I liked the older women's performances the most, even though they were stressful.


Replacing Chef Chico (2/8)
I only saw 2 eps because my Netflix expired so there's not really much I can say about this.

The show is about a prestigious restaurant called Hain that specializes in personalized service and customized menus for its guests. Chef Chico (Sam Milby), the English-speaking hotheaded head chef (unfortunately the line delivery is bad), falls into a coma, and it's up to his sous chef Ella (Alessandra De Rossi) to step up to save their restaurant and preserve its concept. It has a customer-of-the-day format; the first two episodes are centered on illnesses (cancer, Alzheimer's), and I'm not sure how to feel about it yet.

I don't expect this show to have the space for more complex character and relationships arcs. There's some good banter, but the script is mostly cheesy in a "no one in real life talks like this" way. I'm also not sure how to feel about the location choice + production design for their restaurant—maybe it's just that I recognize that restaurant or maybe it's just that they just didn't put their energy into setting up the look and feel of the restaurant, but the vibes feel wrong. I'm curious about the food they feature though!


The Menu (2022)
There's no cannibalism in this one, just a satirical and non-literal "eat the rich" theme. I guess I enjoyed Nic Hoult as a comically unlikeable character and a comically fitting ending? Other than that it was hard for me not to notice the lack of artistry when I've seen NBC Hannibal.


Creation of the Gods: Kingdom of Storms (2023)
I feel that this really has to be seen in the big screen for me to appreciate the theatrics, because otherwise it feels kinda flat on a computer screen.

I was worried at first that it would have too many characters for me to follow (I'm highly unfamiliar with the lore) but thankfully it, uh, narrows down the cast of characters by killing off the unimportant ones. I found Su Daji pretty endearing here haha.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
This was not as tight as the first movie, and the soundtrack not as memorable, but the storytelling continues to be a full audiovisual experience. It's also an excellent sequel! I love how it picks up where we left Miles, emotionally.

The “villains” weren’t that great on their own but they make great foils for the main and supporting characters in a story that isn't about good VS evil. The theme of goodness being an active choice that you make again and again is something I feel extremely strong about, so I felt so seen and fed by it being a huge part of the story. I think I’m in the minority in not being immediately compelled at the beginning, but that made the payoffs even better because they got me to come around. Characters being able to make choices and deal with consequences made them and the story much more dynamic and satisfying, especially with so many different moving pieces finding their place.

My favorite part as an inattentive viewer was when I picked up that the color of something felt vaguely off-shade in ways I couldn’t explain, and that turned out to be one of many significant visual cues for a plot twist. 😂



Elemental (2023)
The racial allegories were shaky as expected (it just doesn't really work...), but the movie's greatest weakness is really just the lack of worldbuilding and interest in building it at all. There wasn't any follow-through on city subplots that I thought should have been treated with more significance than they were—I recognize that a lot of it is symbolic of Ember's storyline, but IMO it shouldn’t be up to individuals to fix the infrastructure??? Everything just becomes less emotionally impactful when the conflict/villain is bad city planning, lol.

The script was kind of lackluster, and the spoken jokes made feel starkly feel that I am not the right age group for this movie HAHAHA. I am also not the target market for the romcom plot since I don't really like romance... but the love interest (Wade) being a soft, supportive, and dedicated himbo whose storyline is only secondary the the FL is a trope that I usually enjoy, on days that I sign up for romance. XD

In spite of all of that, some of the more personal storylines hit very close to home in ways that were emotionally sensible for the main character, and I really enjoyed watching her grow into her feelings!

Overall, neither a great movie nor a bad one. The animation style was interesting, even moving, and I really don't mind that it's not trying to say anything "new". I just wish it had been smaller and less ambitious in its themes.

SIDE NOTE: I'm trying to find the Mandarin dub for this because ZXC plays Wade and from what I've heard of the teaser, his voice is appropriately watery!!!



爱很美味 Delicious Romance (2023)
Streaming on: Netflix PH

Modern-day friendship-focused chick flick with fun dance numbers and great song choices! Direct sequel to the 2021 cdrama. Like the recent Someday or One Day sequel/movie adaptation, it kind of rehashes similar storylines to replicate the experience of the original and make the movie version more friendly to new viewers.

Like the TV series, this movie features extended conflict and questionable but in-character Xia Meng choices (I so badly wanted to introduce her to the drama adaptation of You Are My Glory), but any scene where all three girls were together were great! I just felt that there weren't enough scenes of them being together. XD Wang Shengdi not being in this movie was also a huge loss, since she was a huge reason for why I loved the show.

The storyline I was most pleased with was Liu Jing's storyline because I thought the show really dropped the ball on her, so seeing her reconnect with food made her make sense to me again.

PS. The movie also preserves its cynicism about entertainment industries, including streaming. I liked the little lesson about fantasy cdrama genre distinctions. 😂

I think I've seen enough movies to justify paying for Netflix this month. (And now I can also take a break from watching movies lol.)

流浪地球 | The Wandering Earth (2019)

STREAMING ON: Netflix

A post-apocalyptic movie about individual and human survival, based on a novella by Liu Cixin. The premise for this was very fascinating—the underground cities and the wandering earth—but it didn't feel like it went beyond its concepts or its science, and so it felt quite static and paint-by-numbers. I'm a total sucker for familial love and sacrifice, so I definitely cried at all the right places lol, but the characters and relationships themselves were very two-dimensional and sometimes annoying. The interpersonal conflicts felt manufactured for the sake of drama, which made the emotional parts hollow. I also resented that the Filipino characters were shown to be grimly walking away from conflict!? (It was only a two-second moment but I took it so personally hahaha.)

There were elements of space horror and AI rebellion that were reminiscent of older space movies, but these parts were even less interesting because they felt so far removed from anything else, and were mostly there for practical reasons.

Bonus: Zhao Jinmai (Reset) and Lei Jiayin (The Heart of Genius) are in this!

(Hoping to catch the 2023 prequel too but I definitely need a break.)


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Ang Pagbalik ng Kwago | Leonor Will Never Die (2022)

STREAMING ON: Netflix PH, Amazon US, Vudu US, Google Play US

I’ve been restlessly cycling through media, trying to find something that lands in the sweet spot of artistic but still personally interesting to me, and this is the one that finally did it!

Leonor Will Never Die is a story about personal grief and trauma, told through a metanarrative that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. Leonor Reyes was once a heavyweight in the film industry with a portfolio of action films to her name. Now she spends her days buying bootleg DVDs, being (literally) haunted by the ghost of her dead son, and being berated by her living son. One day a falling television knocks her into a coma, which then causes her to fall into the world of her own unfinished script—a movie where the main character fights social injustices but is ultimately doomed to die. As the movie progresses, the fantastical elements escalate while still retaining a sense of internal logic. The storytelling was extremely immersive in terms of both plot and emotional development, and across all planes of reality. The details felt poignant, lived, human. It also does really well in characterizing Leonor's psychological space as she processes her grief, and showing the repercussions borne by her anxious and estranged adult son Rudy.

The story format is movie-within-a-movie where the walls are permeable, and there's even a visual payoff to the aspect ratio changes as they switch between the modern day and the 80s movie that Leonor's consciousness is stranded in. Additionally, there is a satisfyingly jarring change from mostly-Tagalog to Taglish at the end which starkly differentiated fiction for reality (this probably doesn't get across in the English translation, though).

It sounds so intense when I describe it but it's actually very energetic and joyous, and not even very heavy! And definitely a fully textured experience, from the visual language to the sound production.


CONTENT NOTES: snails (if this bothers you the way it bothers me XD); violence—it's mostly TV violence but with a scene I had to look away from; a background mpreg subplot

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回廊亭 | Revival (2023)
Film adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s The Murder in Kairoutei where it’s a bit too coy about the revenge bits to be emotionally effective. I don't know if a lot of parts had to be cut/reshot, but somehow this movie lacked both external and internal logic. It felt uneven and incomplete, with some scenes going on for too long than warranted while other important scenes went too fast. By the time you get to the final "twist", the momentum has fizzled out and any hint of mystique has been subsumed by ham-fisted plot reveals. The resolution for Ren Suxi's storyline didn't make sense either and the triteness of the dialogue made it even more annoying. It's really frustrating because I like both actresses!

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OKAY I'M DONE o<-<